Goldman Sachs Makes Its First OTC Crypto Trade With Galaxy Digital

The investment bank giant, Goldman Sachs, has made its first OTC crypto trade, in partnership with Galaxy Digital.

Goldman Sachs’s digital assets trade unit has completed the first-ever over-the-counter (OTC) crypto transaction in the form of a bitcoin non-deliverable option, Galaxy Digital announced.

According to the financial institution this is the first OTC crypto transaction by a major bank in the United States and could be interpreted as a sign of maturity of crypto in the eyes of institutional players. 

Damien Vanderwilt, co-President and Head of Global Markets at Galaxy Digital, commented:

“If you think of crypto today, part of the concern of the sector is most of the players in the sector are not players that are familiar to regulators and politicians. What helps is for regulators and government to see that firms like Goldman that they know and trust for decades are also going to be participants

We are pleased to continue to strengthen our relationship with Goldman and expect the transaction to open the door for other banks considering OTC as a conduit for trading digital assets.”

It comes at a time when the investment banking giant is diving deep into crypto after restarting its bitcoin trading desk back in March last year.

Earlier this month news broke that Goldman Sachs is connecting clients to Galaxy Digital’s ETH fund. It’s also beefed up its investments in the space — for instance, it took part in crypto bank Anchorage’s $350 million Series D funding round back in December. 

Options trading is an extremely popular form of investing in cryptocurrency. Instead of traders buying and selling digital assets, they buy and sell contracts that bet on the prices of the assets.

It’s a huge market: In the last 24 hours, $16.5 billion was traded on Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange, on the spot market. And the 24-hour trading volume for its futures market stood at $44 billion.